How Precious Was That While, page 40
Well, it’s possible. First, I may indeed have had a problem in seeing and learning writing. Eyes do not mature immediately, and some studies have shown that many children suffer measurable ocular damage from the close work demanded in school. That’s one reason that so many adults, myself included, need glasses for reading. We protected our dyslexic daughter by having her wear special glasses in first grade, so that her eyes would not be damaged, and as an adult she didn’t need glasses. But most children are not that fortunate. I may also have had something like dyslexia, and it took me time to learn to compensate. It was as if I had an analog mind in a digital world. When I did learn to handle it, I started forging ahead, and in adult life few have ever thought me stupid, and some of those who have, have been surprised when they learned more of me. In fact I think it may be that only those who are not as smart as I am ever think me to be dull. I have an analogy I like: suppose a sports car races with a locomotive. At the starting line, the car races ahead. If the finish line is a hundred yards away, there’s no contest. But if the finish line is three thousand miles away, the locomotive will win, because once it gets up steam it proceeds at a very high rate of speed without pausing. So I was a loser as a child, but not as an adult; my locomotive had finally gotten up speed, and it left most others behind. There is one more thing: I was always slow. I was slow to learn to walk, and to speak. I am still slow to catch on to new things. I was slow to grow, and slow to reach maturity. I am still slow to eat, and still read slowly. That is not a euphemism for stupid; I just take my time, but I get there in the end. Like the locomotive. Give me a timed test and I will not be a high scorer, but I can compete on an open-ended basis. School is timed, but life is an open-ended experience.
So school was difficult for me. It didn’t help having to learn a new school, with its different grounds, teachers, students, and rules, every time I started to catch on to the way of one. One teacher, instead of encouraging me, chastised me for mispronouncing my A’s: “There’s an A in that word! Grass, not grawss.” She was trying to correct my English accent. No wonder I had a problem. The students weren’t any better. In winter I had a fast little sled, a Flexible Flyer, and that was fun. But at one of the schools the old students threw all the sleds of the new students into the river. They were there in plain view in the water, but the teachers ignored it. Teachers just didn’t seem to have much awareness of justice. Or of education. That was over fifty years ago, but I’m not sure it has changed much.
One of the schools was in New York state, with beautiful grounds. It was a boarding school. I was later to see some of the bright caring reports it sent back to my family. They were fantasy; the reality was something else. My main early entertainment was playing in the adjacent garbage dump, because the good facilities were off-limits to us. As a first grader, I was the lowest of the low. Older students took me into a room and told me to take off my clothes. I did so, but gradually became suspicious; to be slow is not to be entirely out of it. So I dressed again and managed to break away, escaping to my own dorm. That night we were watching a movie, and suddenly someone was wading into me, hitting me, pummeling me, beating me up. The teachers paid no attention. I fled out of the building, into the surrounding forest, escaping the beating. I hid behind a tree, wary of pursuit. Indeed it seemed incipient, because as I watched the building, I heard frequent yelling and pounding, as of a gang about to break down the door and charge out. I was terrified. It continued for a long time, and finally I realized that they weren’t actually coming out. So I sneaked around to the other side, and up the stairs, and into bed, and they never spied me. Why should they? I hadn’t even been missed. Later I realized that what I had seen was the outside of the indoor basketball court; the pounding had been the ball and people hitting the wall as they played. If only I had realized that earlier, I would have been spared an evening of terror. So what of the boy who was beating on me? It took me years to put that together: I think he was the one who had been guarding the door during my “initiation”; I had pushed by him and escaped, and that made him mad. Bullies don’t like to let anyone escape. So next time he saw me he waded into me. A first grader couldn’t stand up to a second or third grader. I lived in fear of him, until finally other students decided that enough was enough. They brought us together and had us shake hands, declaring peace. “But what if he goes after me again?” I asked. “Then we’ll beat him up,” they said. That did indeed take care of it; they weren’t bluffing. Justice had come, no thanks to the teachers or school administration.
Yet such things seldom happen of their own accord, and I suspect there was more to it. An older boy befriended me. His name was Craig Work, and he was the child of a black father and white mother, and his IQ had been tested at 180. I realize, in considerable retrospect, that he must have had thorough experience in the rough-and-tumble of life among children. I didn’t know of racism then, and didn’t care that his skin was brown, but surely there were others who did. He was a great friend, and once he started associating with me, things started turning better. I think he had something to do with it. His mother later reported something he had said to her: “Mom, I’m a peaceful kind of guy, and I don’t like to fight. But they make you fight.” Yes indeed. Craig helped teach me how to fight, and that in itself made a difference. I was no longer such an easy target. In fact it got so that I never lost unless my opponent was substantially larger than I. I wasn’t weak, just small. So later, when others tried me out, and found me tougher than expected, they became friends instead of enemies. But at the beginning, at boarding school, I’m sure the considerable shadow of Craig protected me more than somewhat. And of course there were always boys who were substantially larger, so I wasn’t yet out of the wilderness.
My experience with Craig was to affect my social attitude. No one ever had to tell me that racism wasn’t nice; I knew it from the time I first learned of it. My best friend really had been black. When I see racism, I have a kind of mental picture of filth and grubs exposed under a rock. I have trouble understanding how such folk can stand their own company. I don’t believe in Hell, but if by some mischance it exists, I think it must be stocked with racists.
But school was only one of the growing problems of my life. I had been toilet trained in England and Spain, but in America I started wetting the bed at night. This continued for several years. I was checked into a hospital, and that was another awful experience: periodically a group of adults would enter my room, and that was always mischief. Sometimes they wanted to poke a finger into my various orifices, including the rectum—the entire medical establishment seemed to be fascinated with that orifice, so that they even had pretty nurses take my temperature that way. Sometimes they brought deadly needles, inflicting pain on me in the manner that doctors always did to children. Once I woke to hear a cluster of nurses just outside my door, whispering avidly. “Just take it and shove it in!” one was saying. I was terrified; what were they going to do to me? Was it my turn to be tortured the way my sister had been in Spain? Surely it must be a knife they would use. But nobody said a word to me. I realized that they were planning to do it by surprise; without warning would come that sudden thrust, while I screamed helplessly. All in all, I was never able to truly relax, even in sleep. Since I wet my bed only when soundly asleep, I didn’t do it in that hospital. In the end they reported to my parents that there was nothing organically wrong with me; no physical cause for my bedwetting. They were right, in their fashion, but what they didn’t know could fill a volume. I learned later that it was supposed to have been a briefer visit, for observation only, but that there had been a delay in the insurance payment, so they had held me as it were at ransom for several extra days, until they got their payment. I had suffered all that extra time because of a bureaucratic snarl. So what was it with the nurses? I think now that they had merely been exchanging stories in the hall, and it was sheer coincidence that my room was the closest one, so that I could overhear. No surgery had been scheduled for me; that fear had been groundless. If only I had known!
So what was the matter with me? My bedwetting did not abate. Then I began to suffer twitches. Every few seconds I would fling my head around, or give a hard shake to both my hands. Why did I do it? It was like a cough: you can hold it back only so long before it has to come out. Naturally these actions brought further ridicule down on my head. It was evident that I was a pretty fouled-up child. Oh, I would have loved to be normal, but I wasn’t. Yet that, too, was not the major thing.
It started innocently enough, while I was still in that long first grade. This was in New Hampshire, I think. We went to an amusement park that was all inside a big building, another novelty to me. All kinds of things were going on there. There was a huge hollow man-statue with an entrance at the base and exit at the top; I think there was a spiral stairway inside. People were constantly going through it. Every so often the statue would go HO HO HO and wiggle just a little, and the folk inside it would scream. I think that from inside it seemed that the whole thing was falling. My father went on it while we watched, and reported on what he experienced. At one point, beyond the statue, was a room with a table full of nice watches, and a sign saying TAKE ONE. But when he tried to, he found that it was fastened to the table, and electrified; he got a shock. One has to be wary, in a fun house. Later fun houses had jets of air that blew up girls’ dresses so that their underwear showed; somehow the girls didn’t find that as amusing as the boys did. Then my father took me on a ride through the horror house. This was weird and exciting. Ghostly creatures appeared and lurched at the cart, scaring me. Then suddenly a stone wall appeared before us, and we were headed right for it, about to crash—and the cart dropped an inch or so to a lower track, feeling just like a crash. We swung on around the wall, safe after all, and in due course emerged from the darkness. It had been a phenomenal thrill.
But that night I had a terrible dream. It consisted of just four pictures, or brief scenes. In the first, my sister and I were walking along a city street with our mother. That was all; nothing remarkable. In the second, she stopped at a standing structure, like a telephone booth. She entered it, but then the door wouldn’t open, and she was caught inside. The third picture was a forest glade, with an altar, and a woman was lying on it. I knew it was my mother. At the edge of the glade stood a man, and beside him was a lion. The fourth scene was just the man, lifting the lion up in his arms, as if hefting it for weight. That was all—but it so terrified me that I woke screaming. My mother was soon there to comfort me, but it was not possible to expunge the awfulness. I don’t normally believe in dream interpretation; I think that most of it is fantasy, and that even the experts know almost nothing of the real nature of dreams. Right: I alone know their true nature, and I’ll cover that in a moment. But this particular dream, simple as it seems, had formidable meaning, and is the very essence of terror. Here is the interpretation: the first picture is just the introduction, and it was taken from experience. The setting was Spain, and my sister and I did walk along the street with our mother. The second picture refers to the time she made a phone call from a booth, and the door stuck; she did get out, but for a moment I was worried. This connected to something that was preying on my mind, even then: she had said that she might have to have an operation. Little was explained to the children, leaving much to the imagination. Just as when she spoke of seeing a book that had been made into a movie, and I thought that meant that they projected the pages of the book onto the screen for everyone to read. I thought that the operation meant that they would stretch her out on a table and cut into her body with knives. It was horrible to contemplate. The memory of the phone booth was twined with the thought of that operation, as if first they had to catch her so they could do it to her. So, later, when that memory returned in the dream scene, the horror was building, for this time she was indeed caught. The third scene was crafted in part from an experience I had had when walking in the country: I had come across an animal skull. It was the vast, bleached, hollow-eyed bone of a cow, and I understood that death had come to this creature, and this was all that was left of it. That setting, between forest and field, was in my dream, and so it was a place of death. My mother was laid out there for the knife. Her absence from the fourth scene was significant: she must have been eaten by the lion, and now the man, who might have been the anonymous surgeon or perhaps was really my father, was weighing the lion to see how much it had gained. My mother was horribly dead.
So this dream was crafted from several assorted memories, assembled into a horrible whole. But why did it occur? The immediate trigger was the emotion of the horror house ride; it had shaken loose deeper fears. But those fears had been building before then, and they were related to my bedwetting and compulsive twitches. This is the root of the larger story. For our family was coming apart. My parents were in the process of separating, though they themselves may not have realized it at that point. The marriage had not been ideal from the start; they were two intelligent, liberal, socially conscious Quakers, but their more subtle differences doomed their union. As I see it, he was a creature of the country, while she was a creature of the city. He liked the self-sufficiency of the farm and forest; she preferred the civilization of the city. He could work quietly logging or gardening alone; she longed for the thickly clustered conveniences of the populated metropolis. He liked being largely free of the works of mankind; she couldn’t stand a house without hot water or internal sanitary facilities. Note how the dream sequences with the woman are in the city, and with the man are in the country. Their ideal lifestyles were poles apart. There was, of course, more to it than that, but that was enough; he was headed for the farm and she for the city, and ultimately their marriage sundered, leaving them free to find their ideal habitats. There were quarrels, there were reconciliations, there were negotiations, there were compromises, but the end was inevitable. Later this divergence was to be expressed in my fiction: there was the planet Proton, with cities and pollution, and the magic land of Phaze, with forests and unicorns. Yet they were merely aspects of one realm, the city and the country merging. I liked both, and wanted the two to be joined, but they kept separating.
Meanwhile, it was hell on the children, as divorces usually are. I liken it to standing on a mountain, but then the mountain quakes and collapses, and becomes an island in a heaving sea. I was standing there, and my footing was eroding. It became an iceberg, floating in that treacherous sea, and then the ice split so that one of my feet was on each section. The sections separated, leaving me no way to escape the fate of the icy water. So while I was not physically mistreated, emotionally I was suffering. I spoke of root pruning when I lost the nanny in England; now I was pruned again, having lost the second country—Spain—and the remaining foundation of the unified family. No wonder the stress manifested in various ways, such as bedwetting and twitching; I had no legitimate way to handle it. They say that stupid folk don’t have as many emotional problems as smart folk, being too dull to realize how bad things are. The way I was reacting, I must have been far smarter than I seemed.
So how did I survive? There came a point when I realized that my problems were really not of my own making, but stemmed from the stress between my parents. I declared, in effect, emotional independence. I weaned myself away from the family, emotionally, and began building my own framework. It was a long and difficult job, like a climb from a deep and treacherous pit, but in time I got there. My parents were shocked when I stated that they were people I knew and liked, but did not love, yet it was the truth. That was the state I had needed to achieve for emotional survival. It wasn’t ideal, it wasn’t pretty, but it was the only way. I don’t regret the decision; I regret the necessity for it. How would it have been if Joyce, my father’s early love, had lived, and they had married, and I had been their child? I suspect I would have been far happier as a child—and never become a writer. So I can’t really fault the circumstances that brought me into this realm and made me what I am, however uncomfortable they may have been.
Now on this matter of dreams: I have an insatiable curiosity about the nature of the universe and mankind’s place in it, and my profession of writing allows me to explore it all, seeking answers. I have fathomed a number of things to my satisfaction before they were clarified by the scientists, and this is one of them. This discussion will get somewhat intellectual, but I’ll try to make it intelligible. It has been said that we waste a third of our lives in sleep. Baloney; nature doesn’t work that way. It has been said that we use only ten percent of our brains. Baloney, again. While we are up and about we are constantly receiving impressions. Now consider what happens to them: are they just dumped into a virtual vat in the brain and stored for future use? It may seem that way at first blush, but a little thought shows that this is impractical. If you buy groceries for the next week’s meals, do you just dump them pell-mell into the freezer? Chances are you sort them and put them carefully in a number of spots reserved for them, so that you won’t find week-old milk squished under the canned beans, or fresh lettuce coated with cocoa powder. So that when you need butter in a hurry, you won’t have to unload the whole freezer to find it, and then have to thaw it on the stove. (That reminds me of the story my mother told of the day the refrigeration was too cold: “The ice cream’s been in the oven for twenty minutes, and still isn’t soft enough to cut.” It also reminds me of the time I took a pat of butter and dropped it on my plate, and it clinked.) It takes time to sort things properly, but you learn to do it, because it’s better than the alternative. The same is true for anything else; you separate it and sort it and store it for future convenience. So is it any different with memories? Obviously they are well organized, because all our past experience can quickly be brought to bear on a present event. If we spy a small red roughly spherical object before us, we know almost immediately whether it’s the dog’s rubber ball or a giant cherry bomb, and treat it accordingly. But when did we do the massive sorting and filing of memories that allowed us to classify it so rapidly? For such work does take time. I was for some years a file clerk, and I learned that there is no paper so lost as one that has been misfiled or mislabeled. If you’re in an unfamiliar program, with a deadline for an obnoxious assignment, how do you find an article on cooking squash, if your file isn’t organized? Under C for Cooking, or S for Squash, or F for Food, or U for Ugh—who wants it? In fact you have not only to file accurately, you have to cross-reference, so that under COOKING is a note saying SEE SQUASH, along with other notes saying SEE POTATOES, SEE BROCCOLI, SEE BALONEY, and so on. Also under FOOD, and under UGH. So that you can quickly find anything, when you don’t know how the ditsy file clerk classified it. Well, your brain has to do that job too, only it’s a lot more complicated than just a list of recipes. Your entire ongoing life experience has to be sorted and classified and filed in memory for instant retrieval. It doesn’t just happen; it has to be organized. When do you do it—in your sleep? Yes, actually. Part of that 90 percent of the brain that ignorant experts think is unused is actually used for that considerable cross-referencing-and-filing chore. And since you are way too busy in the daytime to do it, the chore must wait for the brain’s downtime: at night. Think of a computer that has some really hot features you’d like to play with, but someone else is using it now; what do you do? You schedule a session during its downtime, when no one else is using it. That’s what your brain does. When you sleep, precious little is coming in from outside. So it calls up the fresh memories of the day, that have been held in temporary storage, and processes them. It takes one memory, such as that of the personable person of the opposite gender who smiled at you during lunch, and compares it rapidly to your prior lifetime’s experience, in the manner of a computer checking for a word beginning with WOW. Whenever there’s some sort of match, it looks farther, and when there’s a significant match, it considers the matter and strengthens the neural pathways that actually make memory. But this aspect takes intelligence, because most of the day’s impressions are not very important in terms of the rest of your life, and you don’t want to clutter your memory with them. For example, if that person was your sibling, you can dump that memory right there. But if there are matches to a similar smile yesterday by a person you well might want to get lost with in a stranded elevator, this bears further consideration. How would it be, if the two of you are going to the sixth floor, and the power fails, and one of you is a bit scared and the other is a bit protective, and you mesh rather nicely, and then a kiss sort of happens, and then the alarm goes off and it’s morning, and all you remember is a rather pleasant dream about an elevator. And so you process everything, and the occasional images that take more serious form as you explore their bypaths are what you call dreams. It’s not wasted time at all; it’s vital to your well-being. Your whole future may be guided in your dreams. But you can’t afford to remember most of them, because they are the sorting process, and any dream you remember has to be treated as a memory and run through that classification mill itself. You would rapidly encounter the phenomenon of diminishing returns.
